Yes. The early coins have been scrutinized pretty heavily, and the more time that passes, the harder it is to move a lot of coins (eg. with each day, the coin-days-destroyed increases, irrespective of exchange rate; and blockchain analysis gets better, which because Satoshi did not move the coins early on is going to work against him ever more—normally, the more time that passes and the more transactions that happen, the worse and more unreliable blockchain analysis gets, but since he’s done no transactions...).
If Dorian came into a lot of money, I would want an explanation: did he sell an early Bitcoin startup? Did some other project (the things Satoshi moved onto) yield dividends? For example, one problem with Jed McCaleb as a candidate was that he seems to be rich, but that problem was satisfactorily addressed by his MtGox sale & Ripple work.
(That investigation proved pointless, incidentally: I ultimately scrapped McCaleb as a candidate because the password hashing on his MtGox codebase was inexcusably sloppy for Satoshi, and I simply can’t see Satoshi deliberately endangering MtGox users just for the off-chance of a hack revealing the sloppiness and inducing researchers to write him off as cryptographically ignorant.)
Your first paragraph seems to be directed more at P(Dorian came into a lot of money | Dorian is Satoshi) than P(Dorian is Satoshi | Dorian came into a lot of money). It explains why you think that being Satoshi does not significantly increase the probability of coming into a lot of money, but it doesn’t explain why you think being Satoshi decreases the probability.
I think I did explain that. Satoshi is one of the early Bitcoin adopters whose finances we understand best: ie he has cashed out and moved ~$0. Being Satoshi substantially decreases the odds of mysteriously being wealthy as compared to all the other early Bitcoin adopters, whose finances are not so nailed down and so who routinely surprise us watchers.
For example, even as I type this, we are being surprised by an early Bitcoin adopter: the 1933x addresses (with 111k btc or ~$70 million’s worth), generally believed to have been Ross Ulbricht’s Silk Road commissions from the first year of operation, abruptly started moving yesterday after being completely inactive since ~Nov 2011; Ulbricht is still in jail, has not pled, and the FBI presumably long ago finished its forensics, so the inescapable conclusion is that we were completely wrong about it being Ulbricht and it’s an unknown actor. If you find someone involved with Bitcoin early on who matches Satoshi’s profile but mysteriously has millions, you haven’t found Satoshi—you’ve found someone like 1933x!
He’s in jail; he has no access to the hardware the FBI seized (with all his encrypted files on them, and it’s hard to unencrypt an encrypted file when you don’t have a copy, even if you know the passphrase); and there is no particular reason to move the coins at this time, with Mtgox shattered & the database leaked. It’s extremely implausible that it’s Ross, now.
It’s much more likely it’s either Karpeles or a Mtgox insider moving around gains for some reason, or the insider realizes their Mtgox account information is now public and is scrambling to disperse their fortune to less-easily-tracked addresses.
Yes. The early coins have been scrutinized pretty heavily, and the more time that passes, the harder it is to move a lot of coins (eg. with each day, the coin-days-destroyed increases, irrespective of exchange rate; and blockchain analysis gets better, which because Satoshi did not move the coins early on is going to work against him ever more—normally, the more time that passes and the more transactions that happen, the worse and more unreliable blockchain analysis gets, but since he’s done no transactions...).
If Dorian came into a lot of money, I would want an explanation: did he sell an early Bitcoin startup? Did some other project (the things Satoshi moved onto) yield dividends? For example, one problem with Jed McCaleb as a candidate was that he seems to be rich, but that problem was satisfactorily addressed by his MtGox sale & Ripple work.
(That investigation proved pointless, incidentally: I ultimately scrapped McCaleb as a candidate because the password hashing on his MtGox codebase was inexcusably sloppy for Satoshi, and I simply can’t see Satoshi deliberately endangering MtGox users just for the off-chance of a hack revealing the sloppiness and inducing researchers to write him off as cryptographically ignorant.)
Your first paragraph seems to be directed more at P(Dorian came into a lot of money | Dorian is Satoshi) than P(Dorian is Satoshi | Dorian came into a lot of money). It explains why you think that being Satoshi does not significantly increase the probability of coming into a lot of money, but it doesn’t explain why you think being Satoshi decreases the probability.
I think I did explain that. Satoshi is one of the early Bitcoin adopters whose finances we understand best: ie he has cashed out and moved ~$0. Being Satoshi substantially decreases the odds of mysteriously being wealthy as compared to all the other early Bitcoin adopters, whose finances are not so nailed down and so who routinely surprise us watchers.
For example, even as I type this, we are being surprised by an early Bitcoin adopter: the 1933x addresses (with 111k btc or ~$70 million’s worth), generally believed to have been Ross Ulbricht’s Silk Road commissions from the first year of operation, abruptly started moving yesterday after being completely inactive since ~Nov 2011; Ulbricht is still in jail, has not pled, and the FBI presumably long ago finished its forensics, so the inescapable conclusion is that we were completely wrong about it being Ulbricht and it’s an unknown actor. If you find someone involved with Bitcoin early on who matches Satoshi’s profile but mysteriously has millions, you haven’t found Satoshi—you’ve found someone like 1933x!
It’s possible he hid some bitcoins somewhere the FBI didn’t get to them, and is now moving them.
He’s in jail; he has no access to the hardware the FBI seized (with all his encrypted files on them, and it’s hard to unencrypt an encrypted file when you don’t have a copy, even if you know the passphrase); and there is no particular reason to move the coins at this time, with Mtgox shattered & the database leaked. It’s extremely implausible that it’s Ross, now.
It’s much more likely it’s either Karpeles or a Mtgox insider moving around gains for some reason, or the insider realizes their Mtgox account information is now public and is scrambling to disperse their fortune to less-easily-tracked addresses.
Maybe he hid a backup on some public data hosting site.